online, 20 students max

$50-75, sliding scale. Please pay what you’re able!

W.H. Auden once wrote in a poem, “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its saying….” But what if this is only half the story? Images and lines, meter and music—these craft elements are essential to the making of a poem. And yet, poems and lyric are more than their individual parts. Poems are acts and invocations. They’re expressions of desire, or confessions of fear or ecstasy, and they’re a powerful way of naming and bringing something imagined yet unrealized into existence. In poems, you build the world. It’s what you do as a writer: abracadabra, create as you speak.

In this workshop we’ll read and talk about work by poets who invite the spiritual and metaphysical into the world of their poems—poets who wield language, story, and lyric as deftly as a wand. We’ll look at poems that pray and poems that argue, poems that don’t shy away from naming what they want. And we’ll spend some time writing our own poems together, too. No prior experience is required for this workshop—all that’s needed is a sense of fun, curiosity, and a little bit of faith in the magic of language.

About the Instructor

Natasha Oladokun is a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia. She earned a BA in English from the University of Virginia, and an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, Twelve Literary Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Image, Harvard Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, Catapult, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is working on her first collection of poems.

Student Testimonials

“In addition to being excellent at her craft, Natasha Oladokun is an exceptional teacher. She modeled incredibly compassionate and constructive feedback that never held back in its striving for excellence.”
“Natasha facilitated conversation and workshops with care and expertise, and was very generous with her time and knowledge.”
“[T]hat’s what made the workshop structure so different from others Natasha has taught. Whereas normally workshop feedback tends to focus too heavily on the minutiae of the poem’s structure —“Why did you break the line here?” — Natasha’s First Wave workshop cut straight to the meat of the process: “Looking at what the poem is saying as opposed to how it is behaving,” and saving the minutiae for the final review process.”

Abracadabra! The Poem as Prayer and Conjuring, 1 session with Natasha Oladokun